Three Cheers for the Tea Party!

I’m not sad to say that I’m cheering for the success of the Tea Party. Surely if they are to ‘succeed’ they will take votes away from Republicans, but more than that they will open up a stale process to a new sort of rebirth and change. They will possibly become nothing more than a Moveon.org of the center-right, but should they begin to break free of their Republican tethers, I will be rooting for them all the way.

A recent poll, conducted by Rasmussen, has already shown the Tea Party as the number two political party in the United States (in a survey that asked respondents to assume that such a party already exists). Many political commentators have read the tea leaves — so to speak — on the emergence of the Tea Party in a myriad of ways; but, in my humble opinion, the best way for progressives to read it, is the beginning of the end for the dictatorial two-headed state. As Nader has called for — more voices and choices, hopefully we are on the cusp of establishing in this country; what parliamentary democracies in numerous other civilized countries have had for some time. Perhaps our political system will finally be stepping out of the dark ages and acknowledging more than liberal or conservative, chocolate or vanilla, muffins or scones.

Rather than reading the Tea Party as what is simply the culmination of the success of Bircher propaganda, and other far right, wing-nut groups; perhaps we are seeing the death knell of a certain kind of ‘democracy’ that never really assuaged much of anyone’s fancies, but that seemed to work for a handful of short-sighted elite causes and interests nearly each and every time. I don’t suspect that getting more ‘voices and choices’ as Nader has put it, will lead to an egalitarian utopia, but when one side of the aisle seems to care about its base and goes to far extremes to placate it, while the other doesn’t even throw its ostensible base seemingly any crumbs from the table or bones; any kind of tweaking or deviation from the standard practice, would seem to me to be some sort of movement, from the muck and mire of longstanding political conventions and codes.